INSIGHT Weekly commentary
August 25, 2006
A Know Nothing Nation?
The newspapers yesterday were filled with a perfect storm of high-level know nothingism. Consider three items:
Now, we know that the Bush administration and the Republican Congress have conducted an attack on science that is unprecedented in scale. On climate change and other environmental issues particularly, this is a government dedicated to twisting science and getting ideologically driven results---or simply to changing the subject.
But it was disheartening to see three in one day. The stem cell imbroglio began in August 2001 when Bush decreed that no federal funding would support new stem cell lines for the remarkably promising research that scientists are doing (and which his spokesman this month said is an act of "killing children"). That the United States is falling behind other countries on this research---which can be applied to virtually any disease or injury---and that medicine will suffer as a result of Bush's medieval mentality are well known. Now, after a clever effort to reduce the moral qualms harbored by a small segment of the American public by developing this technique, we nonetheless see a government condemning this advance and clinging to its perfervid and non-Biblical proscription. Millions or even billions of people could suffer as a consequence.
Whether or not the announced advance in deriving stem cells bears the scrutiny of other scientists, the reactions from the right wing are telling. "Any use of human embryos for research purposes raises serious ethical concerns," said a White House statement, "but it is encouraging to see scientists at least making serious efforts to move away from research that involves the destruction of embryos." Jerry Falwell and religious fundamentalists, the source of much opposition, immediately denounced the technique. So the attempts to satisfy their objections has gone for naught: the right wing is implacably opposed to this biomedical wonder no matter what.
The religious right is probably behind the removal of evolutionary biology from the federal list of academic subjects the Department of Education will support for low-income students. It was discovered publicly only after someone inside the department blew the whistle. And while a spokesperson said it was a mistake, a day later evolutionary biology remained verboten.
The third item is not science as such but it does involve the craft of being objective, using actual evidence, and keeping politics out of judgment. That is the CIA's analysis of Iran's nuclear program and Tehran's involvement in supporting Hezbollah. The agency, burned badly by Cheney's arm-twisting to cook the numbers on Iraq's WMD program, has reverted to more detached and conventional methods in producing its estimates. And intelligence agencies have soft-pedaled the links between the Lebanese resistance group and Iran, and has said the nuclear program in the Islamic Republic is not weapons-capable in the next few years.
Comes now a House Intelligence Committee report saying such caution---one is tempted to call it reality-based analysis---is not good enough: they want red meat for the....what, exactly? An attack on Iran that as of now has no justification? An issue for the mid-term elections? A bone to throw to the anti-Muslim lobbies? Probably all of the above. It has nothing to do with the truth, with empirical research and analysis, and we know this terrain already quite well in the Persian Gulf. (By the way, the intelligence agencies have been estimating---and leaking---the conclusion that Iran is 3-5 years away from a nuclear bomb, and have been doing so regularly since 1982. See the chronology compiled by the Monterrey Institute.) This House "report" is probably a trial baloon for Republicans' hopes to divert attention from the Iraq debacle and rev up Americans' easily excited fears.
But let's hope the know-nothing clique in charge will be forced to explain why, in one day, they are acting to undermine research that could change human health forever for the better, undermine science education, and cook up phony numbers to lead us into another war. That's a trifecta---for the ignorant.
-- John Tirman
This is JohnTirman.com